The Vidor Vidorian
August 25, 1988
The Wade-Feazell Comparison: Part 1
By Rick Young
Staff Writer
McClennan County Attorney Vic Feazell is a bruised-but-not-defeated man after experiencing what some would call the modern-day version of the infamous Spanish Inquisition. A 36-year-old Democrat serving now in his
second term as McClennan County DA, Feazell is a man of conscience, a rarity in today's legal community, a man who can ignore legal opinion and listen to the small voice within that views what is happening around him and say: "This is wrong." Then try to right that wrong.
Because if this trait, Feazell learned first hand what French satirist Voltaire meant when he wrote, in the 1700's, "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
For more than a year, because he was right, Texas Department of Public Safety, the United States Attorney's Office, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation pried into Feazell's life. They examined his actions as an elected official, as a private practice attorney, as a citizen.
The questioned, threatened, harassed and intimidated his friends and associates. The courted his enemies. The federal government's efforts went from engaging the Waco city manager and police department to "make him look bad" to pouring the cereal from the boxes in his kitchen during a search of his home looking for evidence - any evidence - to hang a charge on.
Evidence has since surfaced, and has been corroborated in court testimony, that Waco police used false arrests; there was illegal wiretapping; illegal or improper use of federal income tax records; improper federal attempts to influence state trials and state elections; his wife was arrested; for fruitless attempts to obtain indictments against him - a clear massive and cooperative attempt to "get" Vic Feazell on something, anything so long as he was "gotten." Jail him beat him in his attempt to gain re-election, or both was the apparent goal. Put more succinctly, ruin him.
With this much time, effort, manpower and money expended in an effort to get one man, it is obvious Feazell must have committed a crime more heinous, degenerate, or morally corrupt than the average person could possibly imagine. Why else would three federal, one state, and one local agencies combine to produce such an effort?
During a recent visit to Vidor, Feazell confessed that crime, publicly.
"James Wade and I committed the same crime," Feazell said. "We made Jim Adams mad." According to Feazell, making Jim Adams mad is a sin of Cardinal proportions.
Adams, now retired as head of the Texas Department of Public safety - the commander of the famed Texas Rangers - is a Mexia native and served in the FBI under the late J. Edgar Hoover. Adams was once deputy director of the FBI,
During his iconoclastic rule of the FBI, Hoover ran a tight shi, did things his way. Among other fetes, Hoover got way with illegally wiretapping the United States Attorney General's telephone. And Hoover was a good teacher. After Adams took over the DPS, he ran a tight ship. He had learned well.
Feazell's crime came about during the nationally-publicized Henry Lee Lucas affair. Lucas, an itinerant drifter arrested in Texas in 1983on a minor gun charge, astounded the nation by confessing to an incredible eight-year string of murders all across the country.
The Texas Rangers, the elite force of Adams' Department of Public Safety, took charge of Lucas and he emerged as the biggest trophy they had bagged in decades as law enforcement agencies in 26 states and Canada were able to close books on unsolved murders. People everywhere came to once more love and admire the Rangers for the infallibility and unquestionable integrity. The Rangers assigned two men full-time to Lucas, to travel about the country clearing up murders and accepting the credit for their professionalism.
Vic Feazell had, from the DPS point of view, unmitigated gall to question the Rangers and their efforts after Lucas confessed to three murders in his county. A news reporter from Dallas, looking at the copy and listening to the song ringing off the wire service reports of Lucas' alleged crimes, tipped Feazell that come of the confessions were downright impossibilities Feazell, show stood to clear three of his own unsolved crimes, found enough discrepancies to make him think additional investigation was warranted.
In December, 1984, that small voice within was telling Feazell "This was wrong" and he succumbed. Not trusting the Rangers by this time, he went to DPS intelligence agent Ron Boyter about the situation and what he felt was needed. Feazell, it later proved, was right in not trusting the Rangers and he should have extended that mistrust to DPS as well. When he arrived in Austin to present his case to Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox, he learned Adams had already contacted the A. G.'s office about the situation, calling Feazell "that crazy off-the-wall DA from Waco." By the time he returned home, Feazell was hearing that he was under investigation by the Waco Police Department, under orders of City Manager Dave Smith. Smith and Adams had been friends since high school. Waco police were more than happy to check Feazell out, sine the DA had admonished the Police Chief Larry Scott about his drug people's tendencies toward violence and brutality, had dismissed arrests obtained with defective warrants, and had allowed a special prosecutor to handle a case involving a policeman shooting a handcuffed prisoner.
In April, 1985, as the dimensions of what was to become known as "the Lucas fraud" began surfacing, the investigation of Feazell began in Earnest. A series of stories in the Dallas Times Herald reported..........
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